Spring Weekend With Mythteller and Author Dr. Martin Shaw at Sparkroot Farm
May 18-20 – purchase a one day ticket, or all three days!
FRIDAY at 7 pm thru SUNDAY at 4 pm
“There is foxfur and woodsmoke in his thinking. A kind of outlaw language.” – Robert Bly
Join us for a woodland farm weekend under the tent, with mythteller and author, Martin Shaw. Dr Shaw is at the forefront of the revival of the mythic imagination and widely regarded as one of its most accomplished teachers. He claims the stories we need arrived right on time about five thousand years ago. They were provocative, mysterious, wild and deep. They were the weft and weave between us, the land and the Otherworld. A mighty currency that has lost all its purchase in modern times. This is the inheritance no one ever told you about.
This time together with Martin will revolutionize our capacity to behold ancient stories, to find out what they taste and feel like on our own tongues. We’ll find ourselves in the stories and claim our mythic ground.
How do we move from a society of taking to a culture of giving? How do we develop the capacity to not just see but behold our stories, to trade fantasy for imagination, and comfort for shelter?
These stories could be central to the major conversations of our time: the re-building of culture, the ecological imagination, the capacity for paradox.
Join at Sparkroot Farm us for a weekend not to be missed.
FOX WOMAN DREAMING – Myths from the Edge of the Fire
Friday (evening)
May 18
7-9 pm
An evening of myth, poetry and conversation. Are you ready for story, laughter, learning, and the twinkling eyes of ancient mystery? This is our one evening suitable for families with children ages ten and up!
“I can still remember the first time I heard Martin Shaw tell a story. The tale that emerged was like a living thing, bounding around, throwing itself at all of us there listening. I had never heard anything like it before. Shaw is a one-off, his work is urgent and necessary…” – Paul Kingsnorth, author of The Wake
A THOUSAND PERSIAN HORSES GALLOP – Passion, Eloquence and the Road of Story
Saturday, Daylong teaching
May 19
10 am – 4 pm
Break between 12 – 1:30 – catered lunch will be available for pre-purchase, or bring your own! This is a lovely time for a stroll along the woodland trails and permaculture farm and gardens.
This day is women and men, including older teens.
The heart has a true-north, says Martin Shaw. He uses it. His work combines a magnificence of soul with a deft acuity of intellect, portraying a quintessential comprehension of the human spirit in its mythic path. He writes in a rare register of an earthy seer and I am in awe.” –Jay Griffiths, author of Wild: An Elemental Journey and Kith: The Riddle of the Childscape.
A WAY WE ONCE WERE MADE
Sunday, daylong gathering for Men Only
May 20
10-4 pm
Break from 12-1:30 – perfect time for lunch and a walk about the land, trails, permaculture farm and gardens.
Farm lunch will be available.
For all of us, today is a real cultural moment: the most degraded elements of a toxic masculinity is being being paraded in the full view of the western world, and a degree of consequence is being metered out. Let it be so.
For men that love and admire women, that are raising kids, and are lovers, sons, fathers, brothers, uncles, mentors, partners, we need deep and profound wisdom to draw from at such a time. How do we rise to this cultural moment gracefully, with acute listening, honesty and capacity for depth?
It can be an exhausting business to maintain the shape of being human.
Myth tells us that women and men may only actually be human for a few minutes a day: that any moment we may feel the swoosh of a swans wing, the pad of the fox paw or the bellow of the black bear erupt from our bodies. And that some of those animals are exhausted, wounded or in exile. That we’re not just a revolving door of kings, queens, warriors, and the rest of it. It’s more subtle than that, more porous.
So what’s going to happen?
For the large part of the gathering we will explore an old story, a fairy tale. A mythic story that brings together masculine relationship to animals, magic, the living world, courage-under-fire, tenacity, and the capacity to support those that are to come.
How do we learn how to handle failure elegantly, admit the limits of our wingspan, know what to defend and what to surrender?
We will track where you find yourself in the story and how you could let it have its way with you. There will be some time in the natural world, and shared conversation between us.
It’s a simple and profound thing. Men sitting together for a while, trying to tell the truth, being soaked in story.
Are you coming?
About Dr Martin Shaw:
Martin Shaw is a mythologist and storyteller. He is author of the award winning Myth teller trilogy: A Branch from the Lightning Tree, Snowy Tower and Scatterlings, and director of the Westcountry School of Myth in the UK.
He founded the Oral Tradition and Mythic Life courses at Stanford University. For over a decade Dr. Shaw has taught alongside Robert Bly, James Hillman, John Lee, Malidome Some, Daniel Deardorff, at many mens conferences and events. A wilderness rites-of-passage guide, he has worked with vulnerable youth, returning veterans and hundreds of men and women at crossroads moments in their lives.
Dr. Shaw is regarded as one of the most outstanding new teachers of the mythic imagination. He leads a bustling schedule of conferences, gatherings and wilderness retreats over several continents. He has contributed to Desmond Tutu’s leadership program at Oxford University. Much of his teaching arises from a four year period living in a tent on a succession of English hills.
